


Of Beards and Bad Decisions

by eftsoons



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: A Serious Media Blitz - Freeform, Bad Acting, EXTREMELY Bad Acting, Epic Bromance, F/F, Gay Tessa Virtue - Freeform, Good Ally Scott Moir - Freeform, Minor Dramatic Breakdowns - Freeform, Scott putting his foot in his mouth as usual - Freeform, Supportive Scott Moir - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-08-14 01:23:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16483397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eftsoons/pseuds/eftsoons
Summary: By the age of twelve, Tessa had made peace with the idea that, if she had to marry a man, Scott was probably her best option.  The sight of his (apparently swoon-worthy) jawline didn’t make her weak in the knees, but he was kind and intelligent and objectively handsome, and she liked his company and appreciated the fact that he knew her better than anyone else in the world.  In a lot of ways, she supposed she could do a hell of a lot worse.By the age of nineteen, she realized that she could also do a hell of a lot better....OR the one where Tessa is gay, Scott is an A+ beard, and the world is oblivious as usual.





	1. An Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! So here is a general disclaimer: this is entirely fictional and I know nothing about the actual sexual or romantic identities of any of the people involved in this story or any aspect of their personal lives. Consider this more of a...long-form hypothetical? I don’t know. Basically, I know this is RPF with a heavy emphasis on the F. For fiction.
> 
> I have only the vaguest idea of where I am going with this (read: extremely rough outline). Tags will be added as needed.

Sometimes, Tessa mourned the fact Scott Moir could have been her soulmate if only she had the slightest desire to fuck him.  The rest of the time she was glad that, with all the ways their lives were already so tangled up in one another, there was at least one area where they stayed definitively separated.  

It wasn’t that she didn’t realize that Scott was attractive; she wasn’t blind, after all.  She saw the way the rest of the girls (and some of the boys) at the rink tripped all over themselves trying to get his attention.  She realized that the softness in his hazel eyes and the sharp cut of his jaw and the powerful muscle of his arms and back made for a seriously attractive example of the male sex.  But she also knew that she appreciated him in the way most people appreciated a great work of art: objectively, and preferably from a distance.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, either, because Tessa had loved Scott more than anyone else in the world since she was eight years old.  Even after so many years, there were still times when she felt overwhelmed with the magnitude of that feeling, when she felt the weight of so much of gratitude and respect and admiration and endless, endless fondness that it felt like her sternum was going to crack clean open from it.  

She loved him enough to let it roll off her back when he got short with her after they botched their twizzles.  She loved him enough to keep her hand in his when he clutched it with a painful, bone-crushing pressure as they waited for their scores in the kiss and cry.  She loved him enough to say yes when he asked to put on that one “good” country station while they were driving in her car, although she _almost_ didn’t love him enough to tolerate the off-key singing that followed.

She loved him as they moved from Canada to Canton.  She loved him as they fought against claustrophobia and resentment when the day-to-day grind of training started to meld their lives together.  She loved him when she had her legs sliced open in a hail-mary save their careers, even when he shunned her for the entire length of her recovery afterward.

She loved him through other things, too, including the massive crush he developed on her in his late teens, the awkwardness and stumbling of her explanation for why it wouldn’t work out, and then through the next few years of pointedly ignoring girlfriend after eerily doppelganger-esque girlfriend. 

(She decided that she loved him too much to agree to have sex with him, though, despite wondering on a purely hypothetical level how seamless it could be with someone who knew her body even better than she did.  It wouldn’t be fair to do that to him, not shen she would view it at a science experiment while he would see it as something much more.)

Still, the first time a reporter seriously asked them The Question Tessa was almost tempted to say “yes”.  Scott was her whole life, after all; after you took out all the time she spent skating with, talking to, and unwinding with him, added all the time spent mentally preparing to do one of those activities, and subtracted all the tedious but necessary blocks like “school” and “personal hygiene” and “driving”, she had about ten free minutes left at the end of each day.  And after such a long, Scott-packed agenda, she usually spent those ten minutes lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to think of nothing at all.

Tessa knew what the interviewer was trying to imply, though, so she just smiled neutrally, said “no”, and moved on.

“It’s so stupid!” Tessa vented to Scott on the drive home.  Scott was speeding as usual, and Tessa was blatantly ignoring it despite the lecture her mother had given her the week before about proper vehicular safety.  “Why does anyone even care?”

“I don’t know, T,” Scott replied, shrugging.  But he was tapping his fingers against the steering wheel anxiously, and Tessa knew he was feeling guilty because he still gave her this _look_ sometimes, like she had just discovered the cure for cancer or invented the automobile, and it probably wasn’t doing them any favors.

“Everyone should just mind their own business and let us skate,” Tessa decided, glowering out the windshield.  “What we do off the ice is for just us.”

Scott reached his right hand over the center console to lace his fingers with Tessa’s, preemptively stopping her from taking her anger out on her already-bloody cuticles.  “Just us, Tess,” he agreed. “Fuck the rest of them.”

Tessa squeezed their palms together as they careened down the highway and allowed herself to settle under the weight of this understanding, even as she wished that she’d never be asked that insulting question ever again.

 

Needless to say, this wish was left ungranted.


	2. The Proposal

Deep in the belly of the beast of inside-jokes that was the Tessa-And-Scott hive-mind, February 6th, 2010 would be forever remembered as Beard Day.  They were curled up together on Scott’s hotel room bed after an interview, Scott’s head in Tessa’s lap and Tessa’s fingers carding through Scott’s hair, when the idea first struck them.  

“Why don’t we just...stop fighting it?” Scott questioned.  

His eyes darted up to peer cautiously at Tessa’s face, notably and needlessly worried.  As recently as a year ago, Tessa would have been wary of this suggestion, sure that Scott would read too much into it, but recently he’d been very gleeful about the extended game of tonsil-hockey he had going with pairs skater Jessica Dube, so Tessa wasn’t overly concerned.  “Yeah?” Tessa questioned, quirking an eyebrow down at him. “How come?”

“They never believe us no matter how many times we say we aren’t dating,” Scott replied reasonably, “And if I have to avoid touching you casually in public one more time I’m going to break out in hives.”

“That’s fair,” Tessa agreed.  “Have you talked about it with Jess?”

Scott shrugged.  “Not really,” he replied, “But I don’t see why she’d care.  We aren’t _dating_ dating, and she’s seen us together before.”  

“You didn’t tell her I’m gay, did you?” Tessa checked, her hands freezing in Scott’s hair.  She was sure that he wouldn’t--she’d asked him not to tell anyone and he’d promised--but she still wanted confirmation.

Scott shook his head fervently.  “I wouldn’t do that to you, T,” he replied, and Tessa felt it as her anxiety melted away.

Her hands resumed their stroking motion, and Scott grumbled his satisfaction.  ”Good,” she told him. “Thanks, Scott.”

“Of course,” Scott replied, amiable as ever.  “So. What do you think?”

Tessa bit her lip, considering.  It would be nice to be able to relax around Scott a little bit more in interviews, to remove some of the rigidness between them.  And it would probably also get her mom and her friends temporarily off of her ass with their irritating do-you-have-a-boyfriend questions, which was a definite bonus.  “What would the terms be?” she questioned.

Scott shrugged.  “I dunno,” he replied.  “Just...do whatever we feel like, I guess?  We can just kind of...pretend like we’re at practice, but all the time.”  

“It might be good publicity for us, too,” Tessa mused.  “You know, for our narrative going into the Olympics.”

Scott snorted at that.  “I don’t give a shit about our narrative,” he laughed.

“Well I do,” Tessa retorted, flicking Scott’s eyebrow playfully with her index finger.  “Also, I hate all the interviews and the press; they’re always so invasive, and it always makes us both nervous when they try to wring something out of us.  It would be nice to get the chance to freak them out a little bit, wouldn’t it?”

“Being a dick to interviewers,” Scott drawled, angling his head up to give Tessa a particularly pleased look.  “Ride on, kiddo. Now you’re speaking my language.”

Tessa rolled her eyes, but Scott was halfway serious and she actually halfway appreciated it.  “Whatever you need to tell yourself is fine with me,” she informed him honestly. “We can try it just for tomorrow, to start.  And then at the end of the day we can see how we feel and go from there.”

“Sure,” Scott agreed.  He tipped his head back to press his cheek to the back of Tessa’s hand, nuzzling with almost puppy-like enthusiasm.  

Tessa looked down at her skating partner’s sweet, trusting face, feeling some strange mixture of spitefulness and love.   _Just us_ , she couldn’t help but think to herself.  It was high time they decided started making moves that were just about them.

The next day, Scott wrapped himself around Tessa like cling film and didn’t let go for a minute.  He played with her hair at practice and petted a hand down her back in an interview. He kissed her temple and her shoulder as freely as he wanted, and Tessa let herself lean into him in response.  They looked at one another any way the felt like, and talked about and to each other in whatever way they pleased.

It was refreshing.  

At the end of the day, they sat down in Tessa’s hotel room and came to an easy consensus: they liked this plan.  It was an excellent plan, perhaps the best one they’d ever had, and they were both mad they hadn’t thought of it sooner.  

“What if we just did this forever?” Scott questioned as he stared up at the speckle-painted ceiling.  

Tessa turned to him, her smile going a little bit evil.  “We _could_ ,” she suggested.

Scott’s head jerked in her direction, surprised.  “Yeah?” he asked. He looked about as pleased as she felt.  

“Sure,” Tessa agreed.  “I don’t see why not.” It was only half of a lie, really; she knew that there were probably half a million reasons not to go through with something like this, but she was actively choosing not to think about them.  It was a classic see-no-evil, hear-no-evil move, and she couldn’t have cared less.

“So we’re really doing this, then,” Scott stated.  Disbelief warred with hope in his voice.

“It certainly looks that way,” Tessa responded.  “Do you want to shake on it, partner-in-crime?”

By way of reply, Scott flopped onto his side to face her and hit her with a truly stupendous hairy eyeball.  “You’re hilarious, Virtch,” he drawled.

Tessa grinned.  “I know,” she said.  “That’s why you love me.”

“It’s one of the reasons,” Scott admitted.  Then he flipped onto his back again and clicked the TV on, and they lost the next hour to watching some shitty reality show until Tessa’s roommate returned from dinner and Scott was ousted back to his own room.  

The next day, the plan was rolled out in full force.  They felt more relaxed, the media ate it up, and Marina remained uncharacteristically quiet (even if her looks were pointedly disapproving and judgemental).  All around, Scott and Tessa counted it as a win.


	3. Growth and Regrowth

The biggest problem in her relationship with Scott Moir, Tessa realized, was everyone else.  When it was just her and Scott, everything between them made sense; she loved their weird inside jokes, their instinctive knowledge of one another’s bodies, and the way they could have a whole conversation without saying a word.  Sometimes, they felt more like extensions of one another than separate people, like two limbs attached to a singular form. They were tuned in on one another like a radio frequency that only they could access, and they felt most comfortable when they were close enough for the signal to come in strong.  

Some weeks, Tessa spent every waking hour with Scott either in her direct line of vision or in her periphery.  It didn’t feel claustrophobic like it used to when they’d been kids; it didn’t smother them. They were used to living on top of one another and had learned to feel at home in that state, so there was a naturalness and a comfort to it now, an easiness that carried them through even the most challenging days.

Their therapist thought that this was unhealthily codependent, and started to encourage them to spend time apart.  

Tessa and Scott tried to tell him that they’d discovered the whole codependency thing years ago and had already worked through it.  They tried to explain the strategies they’d developed to give themselves breaks from one another throughout their shared day--standing in silence for a few moments during warm-ups, breaking apart to each do a solitary lap around the rink during a tough practice, chatting with coaches or friends instead of each other during lunch.  Each had become in-tune enough with the other to pinpoint exactly when their partner was getting fed up, and they were old enough now to insist on taking the time to work through conflicts when they arose.

But their therapist didn’t understand how any of that qualified as adaptation, and insisted that they separate themselves.  That weekend, forced to disassemble their joint plans, Tessa went miserably to her cottage and Scott went miserably home to Ilderton, and they suffered so much with burn-out through the next week of training that they promised one another to just _lie_ the next time they were commanded to take time apart.

 _That,_ as usual, felt more like the problem than anything between the two of them.  It was wrong to lie (and to their therapist of all people!), but it was worse than wrong to hurt one another needlessly, so they made due.  

“Do you think he’s right?” Tessa asked one night, very quietly, as she watched the credits of _Bloodsport_ roll from Scott’s lap.  It had been a therapy day, which of course meant a _not-a-date_ date night after to unwind, cheating on their pre-competition diet and pressing as much of their bodies together as they could.

“Who?” Scott asked, lifting his cheek from Tessa’s shoulder.  “And about what?”

Tessa twisted around to give him the eye, telling him wordlessly that she knew he understood her and was purposefully trying to avoid the question.  

Scott sighed, rolled his eyes, and caved.  “I don’t know, T,” he replied. “Maybe? But I don’t think so; _I_ think we’re doing fine.”

“I don’t think so either,” Tessa replied with a smile, turning back around to slump into his chest.  “And I think that trying to fix something that isn’t broken is just going to break it more.”

Scott nodded, his chin moving up and down against Tessa’s spine.  “You’re right,” he realized. “I’m happy just the way we are.”

“Then let’s _stay_ the way we are,” Tessa insisted.  She could feel Scott’s breathing behind her, synced with hers.  If she stayed resting against him like this, their heartbeats would soon follow.  

“Just us?” Scott checked, and the words meant more than they used to, now, if only from being used so many times in so many different situations.  

“Just us,” Tessa responded, like always.  There was a part of her--a massive, stubborn, steadfast part--that knew she could use those words to justify almost anything Scott needed, but also that he would never ask her to.  

Scott sighed in relief and wrapped his arms tighter around Tessa’s middle, pressing them more tightly together.  Tessa felt the ghost of his breath as his lips skimmed over her neck, breathing comfortably against her shoulder blade, and she felt her body finally, completely unwind.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Tessa gets a girlfriend. And Scott gets an attitude about it.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read this story so far! <3


	4. The Smell of Trouble

Tessa started seeing Kaitlyn Weaver sometime while she was recovering from her second surgery back in Canada.  It shouldn’t have been a surprise--Tess and Kaitlyn had always been friendly and it made sense to try dating a skater after his and T’s history of epically bad-mojo with non-athletes--but somehow it still managed to shock him.  

At first, it was great: Kaitlyn’s relationship with her own skating partner was possibly the only platonic relationship in the world more tactile than his relationship with T, so she was completely and totally not jealous.  And seeing more of Kaitlyn meant seeing more of Andrew, too, and Scott was always down for a good hang with the Poje.

It didn’t take long, however, for the pros to become cons.  The problem with Kaitlyn being totally not jealous of him was that when _Scott_ got jealous and tried to get under her skin Kaitlyn came out smelling like a rose and he ended up looking like a huge dick.  And, sure, he and Andrew were _fine_ , but talking to the guy for more than like twenty minutes gave him a headache, which made the way Kaitlyn and Tessa dragged them along on all their dates kind of awkward.  

Also, Andrew definitely made Scott feel bad about himself, which was irritating.  

One time, a few months into dating, he’d tried to bitch to Andrew about how annoying Tessa and Kaitlyn were being, always skyping or giggling over the phone on their days off and leaving their partners hanging out to pound sand.

And Andrew, that sick fuck, had just laughed and said “Maybe it’s a little much, yeah.  But at the end of the day I’m just happy that Kait’s happy.”

What an asshole.  

Tessa, of course, picked up what Scott was putting down and tried to talk it halfway to death.  

First, she tried being angry.  “It’s not fair that you get to date and I don’t,” she told him one day, after suffering through two hours of practice with Scott in a particularly dickish mood.  “I was never like this with you when you were seeing Jess.”

And yeah, Scott _knew that_ , obviously, which only made it worse.  Because then he had to be mad at himself in addition to being mad at her, and he did not care for that shit at all.  

Next, she tried going for a compromise.  “Kaitlyn and I are trying to tone things down for the competitive season,” she informed him one day, on the way to the rink.  “You know, so we can focus more.”

But that made Scott feel like Tessa was trying to mollycoddle him, which only made him angrier.  

Finally, having exhausted all other options, Tessa offered the one solution Scott never allowed himself to ask for: “Do you need me to break up with her?  Because I will, if I need to.”

Scott never told Kaitlyn about that, not ever.  And he tried to erase it from his own mind, too, because it made him realize that he was selfishly fucking this whole partnership with his anger and his jealousy and his ridiculous inability to just be _happy_ for Tess for one goddamn minute, and it made him feel so guilty that he could barely breathe.  And that guilt, of course, only made him more angry.

Because yeah, okay, he’d _dated_ people before, but it had always been about the physical stuff before any of the emotional-bonding garbage got involved.  But Tessa, who was doing indefinite long-distance and said that she would “wait as long as it took”, was going about it all backwards.  It felt like Kaitlyn was stealing all the things that he and Tessa used to do together, taking them away from him one by one, and that eventually she’d take everything and all he and Tess would have left between them would be the time they were _forced_ to spend together on the ice.

He had nightmares about it, actually, all revolving around the same theme of Tessa slipping further and further away from him until they were little more than strangers.  The most horrifying one saw him arriving at the rink one morning to find Tessa standing in the center of a ring of strange skaters, sharing stories about vacations he didn’t know she’d taken.  He walked forward to cut into the circle and she turned around and just stared at him with absolutely no expression on her face, as though she didn’t even recognize him.

He woke up that night shaking uncontrollably, his cheeks wet.  

At his lowest point, Scott considered fucking around with Meryl Davis just to give Tessa a taste of her own medicine-- _let’s see how_ you _like watching your partner sleep with the enemy_ he thought vindictively, as he eyeballed Meryl’s warm-up laps one morning.  But he didn’t go through with it in the end, for two reasons. First, he knew that Kaitlyn and Andrew weren’t really any competition of theirs, not in the same way that Meryl and Charlie were.  And second, picturing Meryl without clothes on actually made him feel a little sick to his stomach, so he doubted that he would be able to sleep with her even for the sake of revenge.

In a way, Cassandra came into the picture at a critical time.  

Tessa hated her in a way she hadn’t hated any of Scott’s previous girlfriends--and for good reason, too, because Cassandra took an immediate dislike to Tessa and was jealous of her from the start.  

In the past this would’ve been a major red flag, but Scott found himself reveling in it instead.  He got a ridiculous amount of enjoyment out of the way Cass always kissed him in front of his partner, Cass’s hand slipping into his back pocket to get a proprietary grasp on his ass.  He appreciated her constantly begging him to come home to Ontario in order to cut into his off-ice time with Tess. And he loved how unabashedly spiteful Cass was as she lusted for the Tessa-less time Scott would get in the off-season.

But with that sort of foundation, perhaps it should have been predictable when things began to sour.

First, he started to realize that the way Cassandra thought she could boss him around was really fucking irritating.  Don’t hold Tessa’s hand so much off the ice. Hang out with Tessa less on the weekends. Don’t talk about Tessa so much over dinner.  Every day, it seemed, there was something new and Tessa-related that Cass wanted him to stop doing, and it felt like pre-Vancouver all over again.  The rebellious side of him wanted to respond to this by grabbing Tessa and jamming his tongue down her throat in front of Cass to retaliate, but he and Tess weren’t exactly on tongue-down-the-throat terms at that time.  

So he didn’t spitefully make out with Tessa, but he _did_ spitefully start hanging out with her again, repurposing some of his anger away from her and back at his girlfriend.  Because if he wanted to watch a movie and cuddle with his partner on a Saturday night then he was going to watch a damn movie and cuddle, dammit, and _fuck_ what Cass thought.  Scott had been Tessa’s partner since he still had baby teeth, so Cassandra and her less-than-a-year relationship with him did _not_ have the authority to tell him how their partnership should work.  

By the mid-season point of Olympic year, Scott’s bitterness with Tess had all but melted away, replaced by an equally powerful urge to be as nice as possible to his partner out of sheer spite.  And Tessa--who honestly should probably be canonized after dealing with all the shit Scott dished out--accepted the treatment with easy grace, and after a certain amount of time Scott’s spiteful intentions petered out and the whole thing just devolved completely back into their old, familiar routine.  

The timing was amazing, considering that Tessa and Scott got their footing back just in time for the Olympics.

The only sticking point was the fact that Scott had yet to apologize, which was something that he knew from experience Tessa would only allow for so long.  So he worked up the courage, thought it through, and decided on a simple but honest “Sorry I’ve been such a dick about the whole Kaitlyn thing,” one day while they were taking a break at the rink.  

Tessa just shrugged, like that action alone was enough to brush off the entire last year.  “I forgive you,” she said.

Scott didn’t know how burdened he’d been by guilt until her statement stripped it away, and he felt the massive weight of it lift off of his shoulders.  He felt it as his breath left him in a rush. “Thanks, T,” he breathed. “You’re the best.”

“I know,” Tessa responded.  She was smiling that wide, bright smile that only came out when he’d done something particularly good, and Scott had never been happier to see it in his life.  “I still don’t like Cassandra, though,” she continued. “She’s an asshole.”

Scott shrugged and allowed it, because it was actually kind of true, especially when it came to Tess.  Later, he would realize that Tessa’s statement and his own lack of rebuttal for it marked the beginning of the end for that relationship.  But at that moment, Scott didn’t think about it.

Instead he just extended his hand to Tessa and smiled, perfectly happy as he watched her take it without hesitation.  


	5. Unavoidable Complications

The thing about being partners with Tessa Virtue, Scott realized, was that her internal logic was so strong that you started to absorb it into your own head by osmosis if you spent too much time with her.  They talked about it a lot; Scott affected the mood of the day, but Tessa always, without fail, affected the logic. It wasn’t always a bad thing, and it had helped their focus and unity often, but sometimes it hurt them both.

The other (related) thing, the one they _didn’t_ talk about much, was that Tessa felt guilty when it came to Scott.  Specifically, she felt guilty for not being attracted to him, like it was some sort of defect of hers and not his problem.  She felt so guilty about it that she let him get away with far too much shit, Scott knew; she let him be angry and testy and childishly churlish at every slight inconvenience, all because she felt bad that she couldn’t give him what she believed he wanted from her.  

It was massively fucked up, and they both (separately) knew it most of the time, so they didn’t talk about it.  But sometimes--very infrequently, but still too often to be fair--Scott internalized her guilt and felt entitled to it and then, by extension, to things that no person should have to give to anyone if they didn’t want to.  

One of these very infrequent sometimes-es happened in Sochi, sometime between their medal ceremony and Scott’s sixth (fifth? seventh?) “celebratory” beer.  He started thinking about Tessa, about how this whole season had been a crapshoot and how Tessa had been right about the coaches all along and how they were going to go out on a skate that didn’t push them to their full potential and how that was going to rankle them throughout their retirement.  And he thought to himself, “we didn’t get anything we wanted yet this season, so why can’t we have this one thing? Why can’t things work out for Tess and I just this once?”

And it was melodramatic and stupid and ridiculous, but he squirmed his way toward her on the dance floor anyway, and he reached out for her hand and spun her.  And she laughed delightedly and his heart soared and when he pulled her into him afterward and looked down at her, her cheeks flushed and her arms around him and her smile so familiar, she looked like everything he’d ever wanted.  So he ducked his face down toward hers, pressing their foreheads together, and tried to kiss her.

Tessa tucked her chin at the last second, and Scott’s mouth connected sloppily with her nose.  

“No, Scott,” Tessa sighed.

Scott blinked down at her, his mouth gaping.  It was the first time in a long time that she’d done something like this to him, the first time in a long time she’d rejected his affection.  “Tess,” he said, pleadingly. He tilted his mouth back toward hers, but she frowned and ducked away again.

“We aren’t doing this, Scott,” she said.  And then she followed that up with “Kaitlyn says I need to learn how to say ‘no’ to you.”  

And that, frankly, threw Scott for a loop at first, because what the hell did _that_ mean?  But then he started to think about it.  He thought, first, about the way she’d stayed in Canton at his insistence even though her instincts had been (rightly) screaming to leave.  He thought about how he snapped at her on bad days at the rink. About the way he complained about her music until she changed the station on the radio.  About how she’d let herself be sliced open, not once but twice, to keep them together.

And he realized, like a bolt of lightning, that Kaitlyn was _right._

His hands dropped away from Tessa instantly, and he took two full steps back.  His heart was suddenly pounding in his chest, loud in his ears. His tongue felt too big in his mouth.  “I gotta go, T,” he said.

“Scott?” Tessa asked.  “Scott, are you okay?”

Scott made himself nod, mechanically.  “Yeah,” he said. He looked at her wide, compassionate eyes, at the way her hands were reaching instinctively for him, and suddenly felt ill.  “Sorry,” he added.

And then he _bolted_ out of there, abandoning Tessa in the middle of the dance floor in Canada House on the day of their Olympic medal ceremony, to vomit into a toilet.  

 

Twenty-four hours later, he found himself sucking a line of bruises down the neck of a blonde curler who’d smiled kindly at him from across the bar, one hand down the front of her pants and the other fisting her hair behind her head.  Sex was a healthy coping mechanism, right?

It was the best one Scott knew, anyway.


End file.
